


Stone and Steel

by LadyHallen



Series: Disney extensions [1]
Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Gen, accidental architecture, excavations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:42:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7145114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyHallen/pseuds/LadyHallen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hiccup gets to realize his mortality and that he might not get to live longer than his dragon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone and Steel

It wasn’t until Hiccup nearly died that he realized something he should have known from the beginning.

Viking life expectancy went only for forty years. Dragons…dragons lived longer.

As he coughed the phlegm from his lungs, he realized that if he died, who would look after Toothless?

He did what he did best; he planned.

.

“I have to think bigger,” Hiccup told Astrid that night. “Longer. For Toothless. Maybe bigger nests, but something ..more.”

Astrid, golden and beautiful in the firelight, scrunched her brows in concentration. As strong as she was, sometimes she forgot logic too. Hiccup didn’t mind, she was adapting some of his methods.

“So, not wood?” she asked. “If you want something to last longer, more, it has to be stone and steel.”

Yeah, that was one of the problems, wasn’t it? Living with dragons was going to be difficult if they couldn’t even accommodate the dragons. The dragons didn’t have to change their habits, they just were. So the Vikings had to adapt.

“You think Gobber would be good?” he mused out loud. “He’s a blacksmith. He’s good with metal.”

Astrid was amused. He could tell by the way she punched him.

“Shut up,” she snapped. “Don’t be stupid. Metal is all Gobber’s good with. And Dragon dentistry. But that’s beside the point.”

Hiccup huffed a laugh. “So that’s a no then?” he asked.

She raised a threatening hand. “I didn’t say that, idiot. You plan it. You managed to make Toothless fly again, didn’t you?”

…Astrid might have a point. God he loved her.

.

Hiccup had apprenticed under Gobber whether willingly or not for almost a decade. He knew metals.

The one who taught him about stone, strangely enough, were the dragons.

In his wanderings with Toothless (when the large, scaly menace wasn’t flying about with his modified tail-fin), he found plenty more caves than there were supposed to naturally be found in Berk. He figured out how when he sees a Nightmare claw at the earth and reshape it.

It still astounded Hiccup as he watched.

He had always known dragons were intelligent. Toothless was an evidence of that. But to see the Nightmare excavate a cave out of the mountain was something else.

He saw the way the dragon wings rose up from the Nightmares back and supported the ceiling. He saw the way she sifted the rocks carefully and tapped like she was listening for something.

In a way, dragons were his greatest teachers.

.

It’s not enough, of course. Hiccup has to experiment because they don’t have books for this. It’s something new, something no one has tried before.

That’s alright, because he’s already tried doing that with Toothless.

Toothless doesn’t understand, at first, why Hiccup can’t do nighttime flying anymore, or why he can’t drop everything to play with him. It hurts a little, but Toothless understands when Hiccup starts studying the rocks and the mountain. And then the Night Fury got enthusiastic and recruited the Nightmares.

Nightmares, or any larger dragon anyway, seemed to enjoy burrowing into rock and sleeping away from the heat.

“Okay bud,” he said as he watched the Nightmare make their new nest. “If I do that by hand, I’ll take ages. I have to make some tools.”

He contemplatively looked at the Nightmares claws, curved and made for furrowing. “Hmm…”

.

It’s a project that takes the better part of two years.

Hiccup studied and devoted his time to excavating the mountain. When Stoic asked, Hiccup’s answer made him seem like he regretted asking.

“I want to build a haven for dragons, where they won’t have to be scared anymore. And since I’m not immortal, this is for Toothless too, so he has a place to stay in when I’m gone.”

Stoic stayed out of his way.

Hiccup didn’t mind. He preferred it that way.

The earth he excavated went to the expand the fields. He accidentally found a mineral vein and used that to create metal support struts that extended from floor to ceiling to prevent cave-ins.

He dug into the mountain and moved the nests inside, putting the Nightmares at the bottom of the mountain and the smaller types at the top. (Of course Toothless picked the highest corridor, hissing at any contenders like an Alpha.)

Fishlegs watched the construction with wide eyes, and then said, “Maybe there should be ledges? For sunning. They’re dragons and reptilian. They like the sun sometimes, Hiccup.”

Hiccup, a bit tired carting around several metric tons of earth for a few months (Though it had done wonders to his body), said, “Why don’t you help me? I’ll teach you.”

Gobber eventually got involved when Snoutlout got Hiccup drunk and chatty enough to talk about how ridiculous he found their flammable houses, given that they lived with dragons.

“Why don’t you just move all of us to this mountain, laddie?” Gobber asked.

Hiccup snorted. “Do people actually want to live that high? I know we just recently discovered flight, but Vikings are creatures of the sea and the earth. Dragons are creatures of the air and fire.”

Hiccup knew he had a point, but the idea still caught on fire and got spread around the village.

And that’s when everyone got involved.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also available at [tumblr](http://ladyhallen.tumblr.com) for any worldbuilding questions and prompts.


End file.
